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Monday, June 15, 2015

Best Books of 2011

Best of 2011

Choosing our 10 Best Books of the Year was not an
arbitrary process, but neither was it a scientific one. How could it be,
when the editors here, like all readers, respond subjectively to any
work of fiction or nonfiction? The one guideline for the 10 was that
they had to have been reviewed in our pages sometime in the past 12
months.

FICTIONTHE ART OF FIELDING
By Chad Harbach. Little, Brown & Company, $25.99.
At a small college on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan, the
baseball team sees its fortunes rise and then rise some more with the
arrival of a supremely gifted shortstop. Harbach’s expansive, allusive
first novel combines the pleasures of an old-fashioned baseball story
with a stately, self-reflective meditation on talent and the limits of
ambition, played out on a field where every hesitation is amplified and
every error judged by an exacting, bloodthirsty audience.11/22/63
By Stephen King. Scribner, $35.
Throughout his career, King has explored fresh ways to blend the
ordinary and the supernatural. His new novel imagines a time portal in a
Maine diner that lets an English teacher go back to 1958 in an effort
to stop Lee Harvey Oswald and — rewardingly for readers — also allows
King to reflect on questions of memory, fate and free will as he richly
evokes midcentury America. The past guards its secrets, this novel
reminds us, and the horror behind the quotidian is time itself.SWAMPLANDIA!
By Karen Russell. Alfred A. Knopf, cloth, $24.95; Vintage Contemporaries, paper, $14.95.
An alligator theme park, a ghost lover, a Styx-like journey through
an Everglades mangrove jungle: Russell’s first novel, about a girl’s
bold effort to preserve her grieving family’s way of life, is suffused
with humor and gothic whimsy. But the real wonders here are the author’s
exuberantly inventive language and her vivid portrait of a heroine who
is wise beyond her years.TEN THOUSAND SAINTS
By Eleanor Henderson. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, $26.99.
Henderson’s fierce, elegiac novel, her first, follows a group of
friends, lovers, parents and children through the straight-edge music
scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic. By delving deeply into
the lives of her characters, tracing their long relationships not only
to one another but also to various substances, Henderson catches
something of the dark, apocalyptic quality of the ’80s.THE TIGER’S WIFE
By Téa Obreht. Random House, cloth, $25; paper, $15.
As war returns to the Balkans, a young doctor inflects her
grandfather’s folk tales with stories of her own coming of age, creating
a vibrant collage of historical testimony that has neither date nor
dateline. Obreht, who was born in Belgrade in 1985 but left at the age
of 7, has recreated, with startling immediacy and presence, a conflict
she herself did not experience.

NONFICTIONARGUABLY
Essays.
By Christopher Hitchens. Twelve, $30.
Our intellectual omnivore’s latest collection could be his last (he’s
dying of esophageal cancer). The book is almost 800 pages, contains
more than 100 essays and addresses a ridiculously wide range of topics,
including Afghanistan, Harry Potter, Thomas Jefferson, waterboarding,
Henry VIII, Saul Bellow and the Ten Commandments, which Hitchens
helpfully revises.THE BOY IN THE MOON
A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son.
By Ian Brown. St. Martin’s Press, $24.99.
A feature writer at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Brown combines a
reporter’s curiosity with a novelist’s instinctive feel for the
unknowable in this exquisite book, an account — at once tender, pained
and unexpectedly funny — of his son, Walker, who was born with a rare
genetic mutation that has deprived him of even the most rudimentary
capacities.MALCOLM X
A Life of Reinvention.
By Manning Marable. Viking, $30.
From petty criminal to drug user to prisoner to minister to
separatist to humanist to martyr. Marable, who worked for more than a
decade on the book and died earlier this year, offers a more complete
and unvarnished portrait of Malcolm X than the one found in his
autobiography. The story remains inspiring.THINKING, FAST AND SLOW
By Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.
We overestimate the importance of whatever it is we’re thinking
about. We misremember the past and misjudge what will make us happy. In
this comprehensive presentation of a life’s work, the world’s most
influential psychologist demonstrates that irrationality is in our
bones, and we are not necessarily the worse for it.A WORLD ON FIRE
Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War.
By Amanda Foreman. Random House, $35.
Which side would Great Britain support during the Civil War? Foreman
gives us an enormous cast of characters and a wealth of vivid
description in her lavish examination of a second battle between North
and South, the trans-Atlantic one waged for British hearts and minds.

100 Notable Books of 2011

THE ANGEL ESMERALDA: Nine Stories.
By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $24.) DeLillo’s first collection of short
fiction, compiling stories written between 1979 and 2011, serves as a
liberating reminder that terror existed long before there was a war on
it.THE ART OF FIELDING.
By Chad Harbach. (Little, Brown, $25.99.) This allusive, Franzen-like
first novel, about a gifted but vulnerable baseball player, proceeds
with a handsome stateliness.THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES.
By Héctor Tobar. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A big, insightful
novel about social and ethnic conflict in contemporary Los Angeles.BIG QUESTIONS. Or, Asomatognosia: Whose Hand Is It Anyway?
Written and illustrated by Anders Brekhus Nilsen. (Drawn &
Quarterly, cloth, $69.95; paper, $44.95.) In this capacious,
metaphysically inclined graphic novel, a flock of finches act out
Nilsen’s unsettling comic vision about the food chain, fate and death.THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC.
By Julie Otsuka. (Knopf, $22.) Through a chorus of narrators, Otsuka
unfurls the stories of Japanese women who came to America in the early
1900s to marry men they’d never met.CANTI.
By Giacomo Leopardi. Translated by Jonathan Galassi. (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, $35.) With this English translation, Leopardi may at last
become as important to American literature as Rilke or Baudelaire.THE CAT’S TABLE.
By Michael Ondaatje. (Knopf, $26.) Ondaatje grants that this novel,
about three daring Ceylonese schoolboys on a sea journey to England,
sometimes uses the “coloring and locations of memoir.”CHANGÓ’S BEADS AND TWO-TONE SHOES.
By William Kennedy. (Viking, $26.95.) In Kennedy’s most musical work of
fiction, a newspaperman attains a cynical old-pro objectivity as
Albany’s political machine pulls out the stops to head off a race riot
in 1968.COME ON ALL YOU GHOSTS.
By Matthew Zapruder. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) Much of the poetry
here, displaying a consistent stillness and confidence, is the strongest
of Zapruder’s career.11/22/63.
By Stephen King. (Scribner, $35.) A meditation on memory, loss, free
will and necessity, King’s novel sends a teacher back to 1958 by way of a
time portal in a Maine diner. His assignment is to stop Lee Harvey
Oswald — but first he must make sure of Oswald’s guilt.THE FREE WORLD.
By David Bezmozgis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Bezmozgis
overturns clichéd expectations of immigrant idealism in his first novel,
which follows a Soviet Jewish family awaiting visas in Rome in 1978.GHOST LIGHTS.
By Lydia Millet. (Norton, $24.95.) Millet sends an I.R.S. agent on a
mission to a Central American jungle, providing a fascinating glimpse of
what can happen when the self’s rhythms and certainties are shaken.THE GRIEF OF OTHERS.
By Leah Hager Cohen. (Riverhead, $26.95.) Complex but fundamentally
decent characters hurt one another and are hurt by forces greater than
themselves, as a family sinks beneath the weight of a terrible secret.GRYPHON: New and Selected Stories.
By Charles Baxter. (Pantheon, $27.95.) Beneath the shadowless Norman
Rockwell contours of Baxter’s Midwest lurks a chilling starkness and
sense of isolation reminiscent of the bleakly beautiful work of Edward
Hopper.HOUSE OF HOLES: A Book of Raunch.
By Nicholson Baker. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Hilarious and
extremely dirty, this episodic assortment of fantasies — part Plato’s
Retreat, part Fantasy Island — celebrates desire, frailty and the comedy
of life.THE LAST WEREWOLF.
By Glen Duncan. (Knopf, $25.95.) A wry, world-weary and
hyper-articulate werewolf, morally as well as physically ambiguous, is
tortured by the spirits of his victims and ready to surrender to his
pursuers.THE LEFTOVERS.
By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin’s, $25.99.) In this novelistic version of
the biblical prophecy known as the Rapture, Hindus, Buddhists and
Muslims as well as Christians mysteriously disappear.LIFE ON MARS.
By Tracy K. Smith. (Graywolf, paper, $15.) Smith’s impressive range is
on full display in her third poetry collection, in which she mourns her
father, who worked on the Hubble Telescope.

THE LONDON TRAIN.
By Tessa Hadley. (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99.) Hadley’s artfully
constructed, socially realistic novel is split between two characters
who react in opposite ways to their old affair.

LONG, LAST, HAPPY: New and Selected Stories.
By Barry Hannah. (Grove, $27.50.) Hannah, who died last year, had a
refined eye for the outrageous; this collection shows he retained full
command of his powers to the end of his life.LOST MEMORY OF SKIN.
By Russell Banks. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) This novel, about a
paroled sex offender, bravely tries to find humanity in people whom
society often despises.THE MARRIAGE PLOT.
By Jeffrey Eugenides. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Eugenides
adeptly renders the patter of college intellectuals and the sweet banter
of courtship, and is particularly astute on the uncertainties awaiting
after graduation.A MOMENT IN THE SUN.
By John Sayles. (McSweeney’s, $29.) Sayles’s reimagining of America at
the turn of the last century nods to both Harriet Beecher Stowe and
Thomas Pynchon.MR. FOX.
By Helen Oyeyemi. (Riverhead, $25.95.) This playful tale is presented
in the alternating voices of a slasher novelist, his wife and his muse,
the last of whom urges the writer to embrace intimacy over violence and
death.MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE.
By Francine Prose. (HarperCollins, $25.99.) Prose’s sardonic novel of a
young Albanian immigrant in New Jersey sets Ameri­ca in high relief,
mordant and comic, light and dark.1Q84.
By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. (Knopf,
$30.50.) This voluminous novel, set in 1984, is simultaneously a
mystery, a love story and a dystopian fantasy that raises questions of
psychology and ethics.OPEN CITY.
By Teju Cole. (Random House, $25.) The peripatetic hero of Cole’s
indelible novel reflects on his adopted New York, the Africa of his
youth, today’s America and a Europe wary of its future.THE PALE KING: An Unfinished Novel.
By David Foster Wallace. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) Unfolding on an epic
scale, this coherent, if uncompleted, portrayal of our age is a grand
parable of “late capitalism,” set in the innards of the Internal Revenue
Service.PARALLEL STORIES.
By Peter Nadas. Translated by Imre Goldstein. (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, $40.) This nearly 1,200-page novel opens in 1989 and is
centered, roughly, on a Budapest apartment building whose residents have
been trapped in the torpor of Communist tyranny.SAY HER NAME.
By Francisco Goldman. (Grove, $24.) Goldman’s passionate, moving
narrative takes as its subject his tragically short marriage to the
writer Aura Estrada, who died in a bodysurfing accident in 2007, when
she was 30.SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE.
By Amos Oz. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, $22.) In these powerful linked stories of longing and
disappointment, Oz returns to a spare, almost allegorical style.THE SENSE OF AN ENDING.
By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $25.) In this Booker Prize winner, an
unexpected bequest forces a man to re-evaluate his relationships,
present and past.SEVEN YEARS.
By Peter Stamm. Translated by Michael Hofmann. (Other Press, paper,
$15.95.) Stamm’s protagonist, an aspiring architect in 1980s Germany,
wanders between his charming, frigid wife and plain but devoted
mistress.SHARDS.
By Ismet Prcic (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.99.) The Bosnian
hero of Prcic’s absorbing and unsettling first novel is shattered by
war.SPACE, IN CHAINS.
By Laura Kasischke. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) What may be the most
ambitious, and disturbing, of Kasischke’s eight books of poems strives
to comprehend first and last things.STONE ARABIA.
By Dana Spiotta. (Scribner, $24.) A faded heroine struggles with the
loss of her brother, an unrecognized rock star, in this acerbic and
deeply sad narrative.THE STRANGER’S CHILD.
By Alan Hollinghurst. (Knopf, $27.95.) Hollinghurst’s sharply drawn
novel tells the story of relatives and scholars grappling with the
legacy of a Rupert Brooke-like poet killed during World War I.THE SUBMISSION.
By Amy Waldman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This resonant and
darkly comic novel, by a former New York Times journalist, imagines an
uproar over a proposed Sept. 11 memorial.

SWAMPLANDIA!
By Karen Russell. (Knopf, $24.95.) Russell’s exuberant first novel, an
expansion of her story “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” concerns the
pleasures and miseries of life in a failing theme park in the
Everglades.

TEN THOUSAND SAINTS.
By Eleanor Henderson. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Henderson’s fierce,
elegiac novel follows a group of friends, lovers, parents and children
through the straight-edge music scene and the early days of the AIDS
epidemic.THIS BEAUTIFUL LIFE.
By Helen Schulman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99.) A family’s Manhattan
life comes apart when their 15-year-old forwards a sexually explicit
video made for him, unsolicited, by a girl two years younger.THE TIGER’S WIFE.
By Téa Obreht. (Random House, $25.) In her first novel, Obreht uses
fable and allegory to illustrate the complexities of Balkan history,
unearthing the region’s patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday
violence.THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR.
By Arthur Phillips. (Random House, $26.) Phillips’s splendidly devious
novel consists of a Shakespearean play of his own virtuosic creation and
an “introduction” that devastatingly reveals the psychological life of
its author.TRAIN DREAMS.
By Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) The taming of the
American West is encompassed in Johnson’s novella, whose orphaned hero
is sent by train in the 1890s into the woods of the Idaho panhandle.NONFICTIONAND SO IT GOES. Kurt Vonnegut: A Life.
By Charles J. Shields. (Holt, $30.) From Dresden to his mother’s
suicide, the early death of a beloved sister, serial unhappy marriages
and literary anxiety, Vonnegut earned his status as Man of Sorrows, as
this diligent and often heartbreaking biography shows.ARGUABLY: Essays.
By Christopher Hitchens. (Twelve, $30.) Hitchens’s esophageal cancer
inevitably throws a shadow over this spirited, provocative, prodigiously
witty collection.THE ART OF CRUELTY: A Reckoning.
By Maggie Nelson. (Norton, $24.95.) Nelson examines representations of
violence in the media, largely aiming her laments high up the cultural
ladder — at the fine arts, literature, theater and even poetry.ASSASSINS OF THE TURQUOISE PALACE.
By Roya Hakakian. (Grove, $25.) In gripping style, Hakakian recounts
the 1992 killings of four Iranian opposition members in Berlin, which
ultimately implicated the top levels of Iran’s leadership.THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY: Explanations That Transform the World.
By David Deutsch. (Viking, $30.) Deutsch’s inexhaustibly curious
exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge pivots on the
European Enlightenment.BELIEVING IS SEEING: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography.
By Errol Morris. (Penguin Press, $40.) The filmmaker is chiefly
interested here in the nature of knowledge, in figuring out where the
truth lies.THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined.
By Steven Pinker. (Viking, $40.) Are humans essentially good or bad?
Has the past century seen moral progress or moral collapse? Pinker
addresses these questions and more.BLOOD, BONES AND BUTTER: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.
By Gabrielle Hamilton. (Random House, $26.) This memoir by the chef at
the Manhattan restaurant Prune is a story of hungers specific and vague.BLUE NIGHTS.
By Joan Didion. (Knopf, $25.) Mourning the 2005 death of her daughter,
Didion presents herself as defenseless against the pain of loss in this
elegantly written memoir.THE BOY IN THE MOON: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son.
By Ian Brown. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) The truth Brown learns from his
severely disabled child is a rare one: the life that seems to destroy
you is the one you long to embrace.CARAVAGGIO: A Life Sacred and Profane.
By Andrew Graham-Dixon. (Norton, $39.95.) Caravaggio’s painting was
deeply affected by the squalor, violence and energy of Roman street
life.CATHERINE THE GREAT: Portrait of a Woman.
By Robert K. Massie. (Random House, $35.) Massie provides a sweeping
narrative about the impressive minor German princess who became empress
of Russia.CLARENCE DARROW: Attorney for the Damned.
By John A. Farrell. (Doubleday, $32.50.) In this biography, Darrow’s
unsavory side is on view, from his personal callousness to his
purchasing of testimony.

PAULINE KAEL: A Life in the Dark.
By Brian Kellow. (Viking, $27.95.) Kellow’s is a fair-minded and deeply
reported biography of the provocative and maddening writer whose essays
about movies transformed American pop-culture criticism.

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Reviewer since 2007 I review a vast array of book — Audio & hard copy. Sharing my love of books with others is wonderful. Over the last twelve years, I've built a reputation for reliable, informative, entertaining reviews. My website is the virtual version of sitting around with friends talking about our latest read. I invite you to visit my site and hang out awhile. RJ's Views

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I've been married for 27 years. I have one daughter & two granddaughters who are the light of my life. I live in TN. I love chocolate, coffee, & ice wine.